Bright Sparks

Renewable Devices for art and Ecology is a research project funded by a Bright Sparks award administered and supported through Gunpowder Park. My initial proposal was to develop concepts collaboratively with project partners around the notion of renewable energy devices and functional social sculpture. What new hybrids could we develop together without the usual client pressures?

With environmental issues becoming seemingly omnipresent in the media and technology becoming ever more available, the role of art is perhaps less about informing the public or creating ‘solutions’ and more about embracing sustainability as an exciting opportunity for the collective imagination. On this particular occasion I am interested in creating ‘drop sculptures’ which are able to integrate and respond to their setting socially and spatially through the stimulus and potential of climate.

This blog is intended to open up the process of this journey – a visual and textual ‘thinking aloud’.

(Justin Carter)

“For its part, mental ecosophy will lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries’ of life and death. It will lead us to search for antidotes to mass-media and the telematic standardization, the conformism of fashion, the manipulation of opinion by advertising, surveys, etc. Its ways of operating will be more like that of an artist, rather than of professional psychiatrists who are always haunted by an outmoded ideal of scientificity”.

(Guattari Felix, 'The Three Ecologies' 1989)